Student Pleads Not Guilty to Sarah Palin Email Exposure

[Hissyspit]

Source: VNUNet

Student pleads not guilty to Sarah Palin email exposure
Faces 20 years in prison

Iain Thomson in San Francisco
vnunet.com, 10 Mar 2009

A 21 year old student faces twenty years in prison for accessing Sarah Palin’s email account and publishing what he found.

David Kernell, son of Democratic Tennessee state Representative Mike Kernell, is facing four charges of intentionally accessing the account without authorization, fraud, unlawful electronic transmission of material outside Tennessee and attempts to conceal records to impede an FBI investigation. If convicted he faces 20 years in prison, a fien of up to $250,000 and five years supervised release.

Kernell is charged with using publically available data to guess the password on the then vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account. He then passed the emails on to online information site Wikileaks.

The case raised concerns that Palin was using her internet email account for official government business as governor of Alaska, and she was forced to hand over the account details. All official business is supposed to be carried out on government accounts for oversight purposes.

Read more: http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2238234/student-pleads-guilty-sarah

[katanalori]

1. well..........

SOMEBODY had to vet her.

[No Elephants]

14. Excellent point,. Funny, too. Welcome.

[wackywaggin]

2. Somethings are really screwed up

Sending someone to prison for accessing an account that a government official (Palin) shouldn't have been using in the first place... What a Joke!!... Then you have the likes of the Madoff clan running free after theivery of billions.

[No Elephants]

13. Not to mention the Bush Crime Family and the rest of Bushco.

[skyounkin]

3. What a joke....and a waste of our tax dollars.

[Ian David]

4. My Headline: "Student Vigilante Pleads Not Guilty to Hacking Sarah Palin's Illegal Email Account."

The kid deserves a fucking medal if he did it.

This should out PALIN in jail, NOT him.

[wackywaggin]

5. Absolutely!!

They should hire you to report on the story accurately!!

[Ian David]

7. Actually, it should be "Alleged Vigilante" but I ran out of room in the subject line. n/t

[Fire1sKid]

9. Damn straight

[McCamy Taylor]

6. So shouldn't the NSA go to jail for reading our email?

Is he being tried in Tennessee court?

[struggle4progress]

8. "I exposed a stupid Republican and all I got was this lousy prison sentence"

Twenty years is a ridiculous threat. Palin was so dumb her password could be guessed by a college kid. The hacking showed that she was not only idiotic about security but attempting to skirt open government laws. The kid doesn't seem to have committed any major fraud, and it looks to me like he actually did Palin a favor (by showing her how naive her password was) and did voters a favor (by exposing her contempt for sunshine). Since I'd rather not have my own accounts hacked, I'm not sure the kid is squeaky clean -- but there's no way he should be facing prison

[lakeguy]

10. fine, but then palin has to do 20 for using an illegal

email account to conduct government business. or maybe they can just call it even.

[LynnTheDem]

11. And what penalties does Palin' face for illegally using personal email account for

govt business???

Just wonderin'.

[No Elephants]

15. Seems neither the Governor of Alaska nor the AG is prosecuting for that crime. Funny that. Maybe

they both should be impeached.

[harmonicon]

12. what a crock of shit

Guessing a password for fucking web-based email shouldn't even be illegal. In most cases - not this one - I think that doing so would be sort of wrong, but just logging into a free email account that requires no contract or actual proof of identity from the user should not be illegal.

[No Elephants]

16. Well, he done wrong, but I pray his sentence is as light as it should be.